About Me

Wednesday, February 28, 2018

As expected, Mrs. Clinton calls for "action" against Russia on behalf of unelected War Industry parasites who consider US taxpayers their slaves. She cites her Sec. of State tenure as authority to advocate for US taxpayer funded "action" against Russia. As Sec. of State, her signature project, "regime change" in Libya, created a bonanza for terrorists, a thriving slave trade, and unending human misery. All for $1 billion US taxpayer dollars. You want war with Russia? Pay for it yourself. Mrs. Clinton's foreign policy experience is filled with grievous mistakes and bloody miscalculations-Robert Parry, James Carden, Consortium News, 4/1/2016, 8/17/2017...(US taxpayers are no longer slaves of the "Yanks are coming" War Industry)

There is also desperation among some Obama administration officials
because the worsening Libyan fiasco threatens to undermine not only
President Barack Obama’s legacy but Clinton’s drive for...the White House.

Clinton’s State Department email exchanges
revealed that her aides saw the Libyan war as a chance to pronounce a
“Clinton doctrine,” bragging about how Clinton’s clever use of “smart
power” could get rid of demonized foreign leaders like Gaddafi. But the
Clinton team was thwarted when President Obama seized the spotlight when
Gaddafi’s government fell.

But Clinton didn’t miss a second chance to take credit on Oct. 20,
2011, after militants captured Gaddafi, sodomized him with a knife and
then murdered him. Appearing on a TV interview, Clinton celebrated Gaddafi’s demise with the quip,"we came; we saw; he died."

However, with Gaddafi and his largely secular regime out of the way,
Islamic militants expanded their power over the country. Some were
terrorists, just as Gaddafi had warned.

One Islamic terror group attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on
Sept. 11, 2012, killing U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three
other American personnel, an incident that Clinton called the worst
moment of her four-year tenure as Secretary of State.

But whatever Gaddafi’s guilt in that earlier era, he renounced
terrorism during George W. Bush’s presidency and surrendered his
unconventional military arsenal. He even assisted Bush’s “war on
terror.” So, Gaddafi’s grisly fate has become a cautionary tale for what
can happen to a leader who makes major security concessions to the
United States.

Clinton may claim she has lots of foreign policy experience, butthe
hard truth is that much of her experience has involved makinggrievous
mistakes and bloody miscalculations."
............................................

On July 2, Raghavan reported onwhat
amounts to Libya’s modern-day slave trade.According to his report,
Libya is “now home to a thriving trade in humans. Unable to pay
exorbitant smuggling fees or swindled by traffickers, some of the
world’s most desperate people are being held as slaves, tortured or
forced into prostitution.”

The numbers help tell the tale. “The number of migrants departing
from Libya is surging,” writes Raghavan, “with more than 70,000 arriving
in Italy so far this year, a 28 percent increase over the same period
last year.”

Taken together, Raghavan’s reports should come as a rude shock to
stalwart supporters of NATO’s intervention in Libya. Yet the
embarrassing fervor with which many embraced the intervention remains
largely undiminished – with, as we will see, one notable exception.

Five months after the start of NATO operation against Gaddafi, Slaughter went public with her approval in an op-ed for the Financial Times titled
“Why Libya Skeptics Were Proved Badly Wrong.” Proving, if nothing else,
that the foreign policy establishment is a reverse meritocracy,
Slaughter holds an endowed chair at Princeton and is also the well-compensated president of the influential Washington think tank New America.

President Obama’s decision to intervene received wide bipartisan
support in the Congressand from media figures across the political
spectrum, including Bill O’Reilly and Cenk Uyghur.

Yet the casus belli used to justify the intervention, as a U.K. parliamentary report made
clear last September, was based on a lie: that the people of the
eastern Libyan city of Benghazi were in imminent danger of being
slaughtered by Gaddafi’s forces.

The report, issued by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee,
states that “Despite his rhetoric, the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi
would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not
supported by the available evidence.”

The report also noted that while “Many Western policymakers genuinely
believed that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered his troops to massacre
civilians in Benghazi…this did not necessarily translate into a
threat to everyone in Benghazi. In short, the scale of the threat to
civilians was presented with unjustified certainty. US intelligence
officials reportedly described the intervention as ‘an
intelligence-light decision.’”

Even as it became clear that the revolution had proved to be a
disaster for the country, the arbiters of acceptable opinion in
Washington continued to insist that NATO’s intervention was not only a
success, but the right thing to do. It is a myth that has gained wide
purchase among D.C.’s foreign policy cognoscenti, despite the judgment
of former President Barack Obama, who famously described the
intervention as “a shit show.”

Still Spinning

A full year after the commencement of NATO’s campaign against
Gaddafi, former NATO Ambassador Ivo Daalder and NATO Supreme Allied
Commander James Stravidis took to the pages of that reliable bellwether
of establishment opinion, Foreign Affairs, to declare that “NATO’s operation in Libya has rightly been hailed as a model intervention.”

According to Daalder and Stravidis, “the alliance responded rapidly
to a deteriorating situation that threatened hundreds of thousands of
civilians rebelling against an oppressive regime.”

In 2016, a Clinton campaign press release justifying
the ill-starred intervention, claimed “Qadhafi and his regime made
perfectly clear what their plans were for dealing with those who stood
up against his reign, using disgusting language in urging his backers to
cleanse the country of these rebels.This was a humanitarian crisis.”

Astonishingly, the campaign “Factsheet” goes on to assert that,
“there was no doubt that further atrocities were on the way, as
Qadhafi’s forces storming towards the county’s second biggest city.” Yet
there is, as both the U.K. parliamentary report and a Harvard study by Alan J. Kuperman found,no evidence for this whatsoever.

“Qaddafi did not perpetrate a ‘bloodbath’ in any of the cities that
his forces recaptured from rebels prior to NATO intervention — including
Ajdabiya, Bani Walid, Brega, Ras Lanuf, Zawiya, and much of Misurata —
so there was,” writes Kuperman, “virtually no risk of such an outcome if
he had been permitted to recapture the last rebel stronghold of
Benghazi.”

Nevertheless, the myth persists. Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Shadi Hamid, the author of Islamic Exceptionalism, continues to insist, against all evidence, that the intervention was a success.

“The Libya intervention was successful,” says Hamid, “The country is
better off today than it would have been had the international community
allowed dictator Muammar Qaddafi to continue his rampage across the
country.”

In this, Hamid is hardly alone. Left-activists in thrall to a
Trotskyite vision of permanent revolution also continue to make the case
that NATO’s intervention was a net positive for the country.

In a recent interview with In These Times, Leila Al-Shami claimed that “If
Gaddafi had not fallen, Libya now would look very much like Syria. In
reality, the situation in Libya is a million times better. Syrian
refugees are fleeing to Libya. Far fewer people have been killed in
Libya since Gaddafi’s falling than in Syria. Gaddafi being ousted was a
success for the Libyan people.”

Partisan affiliation is one of the most stable features of the
modern American electorate. While individuals’ feelings toward
politicians or their attitudes about policy can change quickly,
partisanship is a deep-seated identity resistant to change."...